


Speculation

by appleheart



Series: LoZ Unusual Word Prompts [2]
Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, imagine your audience naked
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-12 20:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4494006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/appleheart/pseuds/appleheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Queen Zelda's mind wanders during a boring council meeting. This is a mistake. (Not specific to any timeline.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Her Perspective

**Author's Note:**

> From the prompt "Apodyopis - The act of mentally undressing someone" from Anonymous.

It started as harmless speculation. With the council session stretching into its fifth hour, even the most well-behaved mind was given to wander. And in such appalling heat, the Queen of Hyrule couldn’t muster up much concern for good behavior—at least in the privacy of her own thoughts.

The chamberlain’s voice buzzed in her ear like a particularly tiresome bumblebee. Most of the councilors he was attempting to persuade had long since lapsed into semiconsciousness. One by one, they sank lower in their chairs. The Queen held herself stiffly upright, knowing that the moment her chin rested on her hand, she was lost. She surveyed the council chamber, searching for something to keep herself awake, if not attentive.

In the sea of pasty faces, glazed with sweat, the sole dark one drew her eye. The Gerudo chieftain—or king, as they styled him, though a king who swore all his oaths to her crown—was still awake, though he did not trouble to hide his boredom with the chamberlain’s speech. He yawned openly from time to time.

She envied him.

The late King had always opined that the desert was too poor to be of much interest to Hyrule. Now that she was Queen, she considered it too vast a region to ignore. One of her first acts after her coronation had been to grant the Gerudo king the place in court for which he had petitioned her father (repeatedly and unsuccessfully.) She found that his heretical beliefs and views on Hylian policies provided a _refreshing_ counterpoint to the councilors she had inherited from her father. It staved off complacency. 

Besides, Ganondorf was a sorcerer, and in the long silence of the gods, a little magic went a long way. Even if she did not understand it fully.

Even silent and motionless, he stood out from the Hylian councilors that surrounded him. He would have loomed over them all if he had not been slouched down in his chair. He was as broad across the chest as any two of them. Her eye was drawn to the visual juxtaposition: not even seeing the person, only an aberration of color and form.

That was when the thought drifted across her mind, aimless and innocent.

_I wonder what he looks like without his armor on._

As if she had spoken, Ganondorf’s eye flicked to hers. She met his gaze blandly. If he hoped to catch her dozing, he would be disappointed. She was an exemplar of dignity, a paragon of wisdom.  From childhood on, she had lived under the weight of unfriendly eyes. Her royal mask could never be allowed to slip. She would not be caught napping in a council session—never mind matter how long the chamberlain had been droning on.

Ye blessed gods, it was stuffy in here. She wished they could throw open a window or five, let the summer air whisk the tedium away.

Her thoughts returned to Ganondorf. It was hotter than this where he came from, she knew. Travelers always spoke of the blistering desert heat, the eternal thirst, the mirages that arose from the desperation of an overcooked mind. No doubt a Hylian summer seemed quite mild when contrasted with his homeland. While the council members on either side of him sweated their way into catatonia in their high-collared shirts and embroidered velvet coats, he lounged in his usual barbarian’s gear, looking bored, but not uncomfortable. The only concession _he_ showed to today’s insufferable heat was throwing his red cape over the back of the chair.  Leather and pig iron covered the rest of his body from the neck down, as always. It was a mystery how he didn't roast outright. 

Perhaps some subtle, personal magic was in play. She envied him even more.

Somehow she could not imagine him dressing the same way when at home. The Gerudo women who accompanied him to Castletown always looked quite cool in their vests and loose cotton trousers. (She envied them, too.) The thought of the face her chamberlain would make if she sat on her revered father’s throne wearing a Gerudo’s limb-baring costume kept her awake a little longer.

When that small amusement faded, she tried to picture how the Gerudo might dress their men. Did he go about bare-chested? Did he always wear those topaz studs, or were those just for show? Even without the armor, his arms had to be as thick around as her waist had been when she took the throne, years ago.

Perhaps if she asked  _very_  nicely, he would let her ride that magnificent black stallion of his sometime. She had coveted it from the first time he rode through Castletown’s gates. The herd of high-strung, trembling white ponies her stables kept for her use could not compare to the rangy desert horses, with their tangled manes and well-muscled necks and the tease of an unknown pedigree. Besides, hers left white hairs on everything she wore.

She envisioned rising from her seat and walking straight out of this suffocatingly humid room. The rest of her councilors could stay and melt into puddles of moist velvet (as, in fact, they seemed on the verge of doing already). The Gerudo women would peel off her stiff and smothering gown like shucking an ear of corn, and dress her in their own breezy garb like a sister. The black stallion would be snorting and pawing, eager to run, ready to carry her far, far away.

Then she envisioned herself being thrown. Worse: being unable to remount (since the black stallion was as oversized as its master) and having to walk back to Castletown with her shoulders bare. Utterly humiliating. Her mind was too practical to permit that much absurdity, even in the privacy of her imagination.

The chamberlain flipped to a new page of notes and drew breath for a new topic. Or perhaps it was the same one. The undersecretary of the commons fainted, sliding down in his chair until he disappeared under the table. Maybe it was cooler under there. Or maybe the stench of sweating feet would finish him off entirely.

No—she would ride  _with_  Ganondorf, then. Forget picturing herself dressed like one of his sisters; that was too much silliness to ask. He would sweep her up sidesaddle onto the stallion before him, billowing gown and all. She would kick off her shoes before they took three steps. They would ride like the wind, no, like a _thunderstorm_ , with the first fat drops sizzling on the hot stone. She would take the pearl-headed pins out of her hair, one by one, and scatter them behind her like pennies for urchins.

Then she would do the same for him, unclasping one topaz ornament after another. His cloak would catch the wind as it slid from his shoulders and billow away like cares departing.

She thought of outrunning the storm, the heat, the humidity, the never-changing buzz of the chamberlain’s voice. Ride far enough and there would be no Hyrule, no Queen, and no eyes upon her. Only the desert, and the surging muscle of the horse beneath her, and the equally powerful arms of the desert man around her. (She was certain his arms would be powerful, since he could not carry the weight of all that armor if he were not as strong as a bear, and at some point in this little daydream he had shed the pig-iron plate.)

There would be an oasis—she thought that would be nice—and the stars would have come out, the furnace heat of the day giving way to a twilight that was scorched clean and cool.

She imagined Ganondorf lifting her down from the horse, herself light as dandelion fluff in his arms and as carefree as a girl. (Where the horse went after that, she couldn’t say.) He would light a fire with a word—

—or could a sorcerer kindle flames with a meaningful glare of his yellow eyes?

—There would be a fire, one way or another. She liked the image of him crouching in the dark, warming dry tinder between his calloused palms. The spreading glow of the flames would race up his arms, tracing their muscled swell like an artist’s paintbrush.

She imagined what it might feel like to run her own fingers from his broad shoulders to his wrists. Under the leather,  he was probably covered in scars: small white stars left behind by arrowheads, pale branching rivers from his sister’s scimitars, a jagged mountain range from some lucky jackal’s bite that had never healed properly. Even in her mind, she was half afraid to touch them—but he would overwhelm her hesitation, his thumb brushing with intimate knowledge across her own scar, the single two-inch white line just above the crease of her elbow.

Perhaps she would be wearing Gerudo clothing after all. It was not so hard to picture now. She suppressed a shiver at the thought of his rough hands against the skin of her waist, where the sun had never touched. A tug on the sash around her hips would draw her closer. The desert man would have to be kneeling before her, his face a little lower than hers, in order for him to press his lips to the hollow of her throat and taste the salt of her sweat there.

(Across the council chamber, in the corner of her eye, she saw him sit suddenly upright in his chair, shifting uncomfortably. He must have dozed off.

She kept her gaze on her chamberlain, outwardly the picture of the grave and attentive Queen, weighing his words. Of course, she had lost the train of his argument completely. She had no idea what he was saying anymore.)

In the desert oasis, the only heat would come from his body. She could almost see him glowing darkly, like a coal, wherever she laid her hands. The night would be deliciously cool against her skin. The wind pulled her damp hair away from her neck—no, that was him, burying his face into her, drinking her like sweet cold water, whispering magic words that made her skin break out in prickles.

She imagined leaving the marks of her own small teeth in the flesh of his shoulders, his chest; imagined him surprised to find the jackal inside her. She could almost feel the sand shift between her bare toes as she pressed against him. The thunder-deep rumble of his laugh thrilled through her.

He seemed to expand without the armor holding him in place, a vast shape that moved against the stars, blotting out their light. She no longer needed them. And she no longer cared for the fire, either, when she imagined him bending over her like the night itself come down to enfold her.

 

* * *

 

When her reverie came to an end, she had all but forgotten about the heat.

The chamberlain finished his lecture, mopping his brow. He was surprised to find his Queen smiling at him. “Our thanks for such an invigorating presentation,” she said graciously, while the rest of her councilors roused themselves from their stupor. “You have given us much to think about, truly.”

(Her chamberlain would later check his notes, wondering what  _exactly_  his Queen found invigorating about the various per cent increases that might  accrue should the tenant farmers in the foothills around Kakariko plant lentils instead of barley on the southward slopes in the fourth year of crop rotations rather than the fifth, but why he did not, as her father’s most trusted adviser, recommend such a drastic change, for various other reasons.)

She bestowed the same unlooked-for smile on all of her councilors as they took their leave. The smile she offered to Ganondorf was not one jot greater or lesser. Her self-control was too assured for that.

As the desert man bowed to her, he murmured something she couldn't quite make out. It _sounded_ like "not sidesaddle.” His accent was heavy, though, and the pronouncement so incongruous, that she decided she had probably misheard him. It was equally likely he had muttered some remark about the chamberlain, or the heat.

 

* * *

 

Some weeks later, she heard some of the Gerudo who attended Ganondorf talking about their king’s youthful apprenticeship to the fabled witches of the desert. If the rumors could be believed—and one of the women was swearing to it on her mother’s womb, which seemed to be a serious matter—their magic was so powerful that it allowed them to read the very thoughts of the supplicants who came before them.

She thought nothing of it until she was taking her evening meal. From her window, she could see Ganondorf and his sisters in the stableyard, mounting up for an afternoon ride. As she watched, one hoisted herself up behind him, seated astride the stallion like a careless farmgirl.

 _Not sidesaddle_ , he had said. She had heard him correctly.

Midway through a bite of stewed rabbit, the Queen was attacked by a violent coughing fit. The break in her normally perfect poise would have been distressing enough for her attendants (one raced off to accuse the cook of poison) but when she could speak again, the first ragged words out of her mouth were so uncharacteristically profane that one prayed to the gods that she had not lost her wits.


	2. His Perspective

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From the prompt "Gymnophoria - The sensation that someone is mentally undressing you" from [bearerofwisdom](http://bearerofwisdom.tumblr.com).

Din’s sake.

Her thoughts were so fixed upon him that he couldn’t  _help_  but hear them. And she had no idea.

Or if she did know, she concealed it with aplomb. Her cool gaze was fixed innocently on the little man addressing her councilors, her expression composed, not a blush on her cheek. As though she were not envisioning stripping him for her pleasure. 

He fidgeted in increasing discomfort. He had not known the Queen of Hyrule possessed such a...  _vivid_ imagination.

The council meeting dragged on, mercilessly, giving him no choice but to suffer the Queen’s daydreams and his own futile, unwilling arousal. He rued the day he had ever learned the mind-reading spell.


End file.
